Criminal Law, Practice & Policy

Well, it pays the bills. A solo criminal defense practice that generates over $100,000 in billings. No employees and no need to advertise. There’s just one small detail: you’ll handle 558 cases in a year and take 4 to trial. Fewer than one percent. It’s not difficult to find a solo practice like the one […]

For the second year in a row, Scott Greenfield is running a contest for the best criminal law blog post for 2010. Because I’ve been so busy these days, I only read a handful regularly – though I also visit posts with headlines that catch my eye or that friends highlight on Twitter or FB. […]

Last Friday, I had the privilege of attending, and presenting a session on niche practice at The Practice, organized by my friend and colleague Brian Tannebaum, this year’s president of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (FACDL) . Geared towards criminal defense lawyers running a law firm, the Practice touched on all of the […]

I’ll admit that I’ve always had mixed feelings on the question of whether to solo straight out of law school. As I explained in this early post, from my perspective, it made sense for new grads with no work history and with significant student loan debt to take a paying job if only for a […]

One of my solo-centric colleagues, Susan Cartier-Liebel of Solo Practice University is running a two-part series on niche practice over at her Build a Solo Practice blog, so I didn’t want to send you into niche-overload. But I after seeing this article from the National Law Journal on “pot law practices,” I couldn’t resist. Though […]

What sets us lawyers apart from computers or services like LegalZoom is our ability to counsel clients and help them make decisions. Counseling clients is the very essence of what we do as lawyers — so much so that failure to advise clients on obvious consequences of a decision to plead guilty — such as […]

Russ Bensing of the Briefcase provides this quick but thorough recap of the Supreme Court’s thirteen criminal law related decisions of the past term, with links to each of the decision. Bensing describes that his summary keeps with the original intention of his blog, which was to "create a resource for solo practitioners and small […]

Over at The WSJ Law Blog, there’s a nice profile of Richard Diaz, the Florida solo who represents Michael Williams, a defendant who is challenging the constitutionality of a federal child-pornography statute in United States v. Williams. Last week, Diaz argued the case before the Supreme Court. But despite his moment of glory at WSJ […]

At Illinois Trial Lawyer , Evan Schaeffer shares a wonderfully valuable resource, The Center for Criminal Justice Advocacy. The Center was formed as a free, non-partisan training resource to assist new lawyers in becoming competent criminal practitioners. And one of the Center’s missions is to provide newly licensed sole practitioners with materials to provide a […]

Over at Legal Blogwatch, I posted here about a recent analysis by Volokh guest blogger Andy Leipold, who found that criminal defendants stand a better chance of acquittal before a jury. I thought that the study might help some of my readers who practice criminal law to make more informed decisions about a bench or […]